Red Spikes (14 page)

A frail tower of scaffolding appeared on the horizon, leading up to Hell’s lowest convexity. The escort picked their way towards it, swearing under their breath as the stones bit into their feet, staggering off balance now and again. The Miscreant fell once, opening a cut on his forehead and bruising his cheek.

‘I couldn’t put my hands out,’ he complained. ‘Maybe you could just untie my hands, for this part?’

‘I’m sorry.’ King brushed the red dust off the man’s belly, genitals and thigh. ‘We’ll just walk a bit slower, shall we?’

‘You know,’ said the Miscreant, ‘it’s almost good to feel pain! The pain is better than the nothingness, don’t you think? What a terrible place this is! Do you get a lot of people purposely hurting themselves here?’

‘When they first arrive, sometimes,’ said Tabatha. ‘But they calm down after a while, and fit in with the rest of us.’

Leah watched the red ground pass. Tabatha was a bit of a goody-goody, she thought.
The rest of us
– how cosy. What a cosy little community we are.

‘After all, you can’t
end
this, yourself,’ Tabatha went on. ‘You can’t self-harm your way out of it. Only way out is to pick up brownie points, or by intercession from someone back in the old world.’

Brownie points,
was it? Leah wondered what the All-Mighty would think of that phrase.

Wooden stairs zigzagged up inside the scaffolding. The canvas enclosing its middle two sections rippled in the breeze. ‘Up we go, then.’ Tabatha started to climb.

Leah brought up the rear. She hung back a little so as to have the Miscreant’s grubby feet at her eye-level, rather than his flabby white bottom and bitten-nailed hands.

In the first canvas room they took woven bootees from the water trough and tied them to their feet. Water squeezed from the thick soles and rained between the floorboards onto the steps below. They slopped upstairs to the second room.

‘This is where we turn over,’ King told the Miscreant. ‘Don’t freak out – it might feel a bit weird.’

‘Whee,’ said Tabatha, somersaulting off the top step into the shadows.

‘You out of the way?’ Barto jumped after her.

‘It’s quite enjoyable.’ King turned in the opening and addressed the Miscreant upside-down. ‘It’s about the most fun anyone gets in this place.’

The Miscreant’s boots lifted off the step. ‘No, wait a minute—’ He kicked out, and water flew into Leah’s face. He misjudged everything; his head banged on the top step. His frightened, wounded face stared out at Leah for a moment before he floated up into the dim landing-space.

‘Christ, King, you’re supposed to be looking after him.’ Leah’s hair rose and the weight lifted out of her spine. She checked the air above and let go into it. Bodies revolved in the dim tented space, and water-drops wobbled, unsure which way to fall. ‘Let’s move along now,’ she said.

They bounced and sprang along the weightless landing to the far door, and dropped out onto the upper stairs. Now the creased, pockmarked grey rock of the Hell sphere was the ground, and the sky that hung over them was the red stony plain. The air was close and smelly.

Down they went onto the rock. Their boots hissed on contact with it.

‘Not far now,’ said Tabatha.

‘I don’t care how far it is,’ muttered the Miscreant.

Leah peered around him at the machinery and the desk in the distance, and the staffers moving about getting ready for them.

Tsss, tsss, tsss, tsss,
went the bootees for the first little while. Then the soles dried out, and the smell of charred grass began to join that of sulphur. It was uncomfortably hot. The ground was creased cooled lava, easier to walk on than stones or swamp.

‘Pick up the pace,’ said King to the Miscreant, ‘or our boots’ll run out on the way back.’

‘Oh, poor you,’ said the Miscreant, obediently starting to jog. ‘How you’ll suffer.’

As if you had cause to complain,
thought Leah.
It’s not as
if you weren’t warned. Everybody gets warned somehow, even if
they’re brought up under a Wrong God. Oog
– she made herself look away from his jogging bottom –
so much flesh. If I’d
grown that old, I never would’ve let that happen to me.

‘Ahoy there,’ cried a woman in a silver firesuit up ahead, clapping her gloved hands. ‘You got a Clerical there for us?’

‘I don’t know what he is – that’s not my privilege,’ said Tabatha. ‘All I know is, he goes in here.’

‘Good-oh,’ said a firesuited man. ‘Helps us tell one moment from another.’ He shot Leah a cold grin.

The man at the desk was small, hunched and pernickety-looking. He took the satchel and peered down his nose at each paper in turn, as if keeping an invisible pair of reading glasses on his nose. Then he dropped his head, glowered at them above the same glasses and pointed a thumb at the machinery.

Leah had been here twice before. Both times she’d been picking up, and the Soul had been waiting for them, sitting happily on the desk swinging his legs. She’d never seen the machinery operate before.

One of the firesuited people slapped a switch and the whole black affair shuddered into life. All the staffers had their head-pieces on now – they were silver all over, with flat black faces. They each took, from a hook on the machine’s slabby side, a silver pole that divided at the top into many vicious little spikes.

The wheels turned. The chain tightened on the eyebolt in the ground. The circle of the lid was suddenly clear in the rock, outlined in knee-high puffs of smoke. Human screams rushed out with the smoke.

The Miscreant leaped back, pulling the string from King’s hand. He ran, but Leah dived after him and brought him down by the ankle, and the others piled straight on top of him. Leah jumped up off the scorching ground and pinned his leg down. Barto bucked on the other one and Tabatha and King took care of arms and torso. ‘It’s too
late
. It’s too
late
,’ Tabatha said grimly into the man’s ear. ‘Where do you think you would run to?’

Still he struggled. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Barto, almost thrown off the leg. He took a firmer hold. ‘Strong! Who would’ve thought such a flabby old thing—’

The Miscreant bucked and rippled again.

‘How can he stand it? He must be burning all down his front—’

‘You know what will stop this?’ Leah hissed at Barto. ‘Grabbing him by the nuts. Bags you do it.’

‘Bags I
don’t
.’

‘
Go on
.’ This was almost funny. Leah was almost laughing. ‘You’re the boy.’

‘Eesh, I’m not grabbing some old feller’s
nuts
!’

‘Here.’ A firesuit came up. ‘Move aside,’ it said in a muffled voice. ‘I’ll pitchfork him.’

Gently he lowered his spike-points onto the Miscreant’s back.

‘That’s better.’ Tabatha gingerly climbed off the captive.

They all slid off him. King took up the string again. ‘Now don’t try that again,’ he said. ‘This man will happily poke you straight into the fire like a marshmallow on a stick.’

They helped the Miscreant up. He was crying now; his front was all red, flecked with black from the ground. His face was terrible, all crumpled and slavery like that, and with its injuries.

‘Please, please,’ he said. ‘Oh no, please!’

He could hardly use his legs. He was extremely heavy. They dragged him towards the lid. It was a little way open now. Something moved in the smoke like a dark sea anemone. Trying to see it more clearly, Leah felt holes open in the Outer’s greyness, which shrank somewhat on her mind, at the touch of a realisation, and with the realisation, feeling.

For they were hands, all those movements, blood-red hands on the blood-streaked, steaming arms of the Damned. In a frenzy they waved and clutched at the Outer’s air, they pawed the lid and the ground; they left prints; they wet and reddened the rock with their slaps and slidings.

The firesuits stood well back from the opening. Any hand that found a grip they prodded until it flinched back into the waving mass, into the high suffering howl of Hell.

The Miscreant pressed back into his escort; Leah couldn’t hear him for machine-noise and screaming, but she felt the horror as if he were squeezing it out like a sponge, as if she were taking it up like a sponge, a grey, dry sponge soaking up juice and colour. Suddenly Barto’s face was open, lively; suddenly there was a vigour in Tabatha’s bracing herself to push, in King’s new grasp on the Miscreant’s upper arm. Leah pulled in a great noseful of the dreadful, wonderful cooking-meat smell of the Damned, the hot-metal smell of the machinery, the thick yellow stench of brimstone.

The machinery ground; the massive lid lifted unsteadily, revealing its many layers of black polished rock and brass, all smattered with Damned-fluids. Smoke, some yellow, some grey, some black, belched out all around; steam jetted white across the ground. Coughing, Leah heaved the Miscreant forward by his shoulder.

A Damned Soul sprang out of the smoke. It caught the Miscreant by the shoulder, Leah by her arm, and screamed in their faces in a fast, foreign language. Its eyes rolled and steamed; its whole face was misshapen. The skin of it, the raw skin!

‘Git back there!’ growled a firesuit, forcing the Soul back with a pole across its middle. Through the smoke and the glorious all-engulfing sensations of her own retching, Leah had an impression of a person being folded and forced away. Like a crab into a crevice, she thought, pushing the Miscreant forward again – only rubbery. And raw – that skin! The points of the pitchfork had sliced across that Soul’s belly, and the wounds had
sizzled
with blood and fluids rushing to heal it, to make the skin clean and raw again and ready to suffer more.

This was what she wanted, what she needed, to see such things and to see them clearly. The sulphur jabbed her nostrils and she sniffed it up and coughed, exultant. The Miscreant’s shaggy boot-toes flamed near the lip of the opening; hands painted them red, stroke by stroke. She took slippery white handfuls of him and, in a spasm of revulsion and joy, forced him into the centre of the red sea anemone.

Its many arms hauled him in. Maybe they thought they could pull themselves past him into the Outer; perhaps they thought to plead with him; maybe they just wanted someone else to share their misery. Whatever they wanted, the red Souls folded the white, flailing Soul in.

It was like watching a kebab being rolled
, Barto would say later.
A chicken kebab.

Don’t be awful
, Tabatha would say, trying to cringe, trying to care enough.

The escort pulled their hands and feet free of the roaring Souls. Pitchforks poked and hissed, intervening for them. The machinery clanked; the lid shuddered and began to lower. In the desperate red scramble just inside the rim, the faces –
I will never forget these
, Leah thought raptly,
I will never be able
– the hairless faces, all melted and remelted flesh, spat and bubbled and ran with juices. And they knew – their eyes begged and their bloodied lips pleaded in a thousand different languages.

Barto gagged beside Leah, King clutched her and wept, Tabatha dragged at their sleeves: ‘Come away! Come away!’

But Leah stayed, her eyes and heart still feasting. Just as she’d craned for the last possible glimpse of that other eternity, Heaven, so she must peer around the firesuit to see as many hands, as many faces as she could, as the lid crushed them, as they clutched the very pitchforks that forced them back into suffering.

‘Bloody, sticky things!’ The nearest firesuit scraped off against the rim a Soul that had impaled itself chest first upon her fork. ‘How much more pain do you want?’ The Soul fish-flopped, then was clawed away by others more desperate, more able.

The dire howling lessened; there were just hands now, flickering among the yellow flames that came up where hopeless souls had dropped away and left gaps in the crowd. They made a frill, a lace-work of red fingers, a fur of black and yellow smoke, a feather of gold flame, a stinking sleeve edge that shortened, shortened—

Thud.
The lid closed, sealing in the Damned.

The firesuit turned away and snatched off its hood. The woman inside grinned down at Leah. ‘Better get a move on,’ she said.

Tabatha was already starting for the tower, grabbing up the satchel as she passed the desk. Barto stared at the lid over Leah’s shoulder, both hands to his mouth. King, on all fours, leaned hard against her knees, retching.

‘Come on, laddie.’ The firesuit prodded him gently with her bloodied pitchfork. ‘Those boots won’t last much longer.’

‘And you’re burning yourself.’ Leah pulled on his shoulder.

Supporting him, she followed Tabatha. They must take the stamped papers up to Heaven Gate and lodge them. Leah’s imagination was as clear as a sunlit tide-pool now; she could just see those snooty Registrars dipping their quills to add the marks, the
brownie points
, to each team member’s record book. Those marks would build – who knew how fast? Who knew how many were needed? – until there were enough to release him or her from the Outer forever, and into Heaven and the Eternal Benediction and the Light.

Leah’s feet stung. The soles of the bootees were black and fringed with burnt rush-weave.

‘Hurry, King.’ She pushed him along in the small of the back. He tried to speak over his shoulder – his face was greenish, and his lips puffed out with nauseated burps. ‘I heard one of them say—’

‘Just
run
, King! Talk when we get to the ladder!’

And they ran, pell-mell, elated. One of Barto’s bootees gave out, shredding off his foot. He tried a strange hopping run for a few paces, then seemed to take off and fly across the hot black ridges to the scaffolding.

They flung themselves after him, finally landing in a clump on the lowest steps. A few moments filled with-groans and panting. Then they spread out onto separate steps.

‘Oh, my
feet
!’

‘Uff! This is from his fingernails, look! Like a – like a
tiger
-claw or something.’

‘Look at King!’ King’s hands and knees had puffed up as if inflated.

‘He whacked me in the mouth
so
hard, that Soul. I thought I’d lost some teeth. I think this one’s a bit wobbly. Does this look wobbly to you, Leah?’